One day, Duluth’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low are at Geek Prom; four days later they are doing about the coolest thing imaginable, hanging out with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Perhaps the line between geeky and cool has now been blurred beyond all recognition.

Makes me a little sad/nostalgic my rock heroes get old too, and they're just ordinary folk. I guess it's another case of hunkaloona matatta. For what it's worth, I sat on the beach today and hammered out Stairway on an old Yamaha guitar. All that glitters is gold...

Old rock stars are still cool. I like them better then a lot of young rock stars. The famous old quote about the Rolling Stones, they are so ugly they are appealing. I still have all the Led Zepplin albums.

Important to note, back then, before Tweets and Ear Candy, few had ever heard of Lord of the Rings, D&D didn't exist, Tolkien was an obscure British Isles author. Nowadays it's just nerdy, but since Plant has probably seen fairies and shit, we can't judge him on the modern Sam Wise franchise. Why did that gnome hairdo, long all over but with clipped bangs, ever go out of style? Did it pave the way for the mullet?
And why are they all hanging out in the boiler room? If Page was there, candles would render this photo useless, there'd be skeletons in the corner, and a crystal ball on the blood-stained pentagon table.

Barrett is right in that it didn't take Led Zeppelin to make the LOTR trilogy popular. Although they were published in 1954-1955, it wasn't until the mid-to-late 1960s that they became enormously popular. So there was a relative period of obscurity mixed in there. That's when they were released in inexpensive paperback form and became popular with the hippies, among others. I think Zeppelin's first reference to LOTR was in Ramble On from 1969. So the books were quite popular by that point in time.

Agreed, Chris. Maybe the average proto-metalhead didn't know what LOTR was before Zep, but readers knew. Just because it wasn't a household name doesn't make it "obscure." And I have to speculate that the people who were into LOTR initially were REALLY into it on a meganerd level.
This post just made me realize that I need to get the Led out.

Fine, but nowhere near as popular as now, like one one hundredth probably. Esp without the aid of internet, twas pre [email protected] and DVD was it not? I think the fantasy genre at large didn't really pick up or diversify until the 70's. Barrett, I get my information from a little voice in my head, I thought you knew that by now. Tells me to seek all five covers of In Through the Out Door.
You watch Plant's fantasy in Song Remains, and the Sword in the Stone shtick is clearly geospiritually closer to his senses than we USArs, because he is English, which in my simian world view somehow makes it less nerdy, when its been a native part of his sensibilities for longer. He's probably even related to Merlin or Arthur. Aside, I don't think anyone balances family life and rock star quite like the Sparhawk. But he doesn't blow me away like Haley Bonar did last night on stage with her new material. She was far better than I expected, and had me curled up in the fetal position by set's end, I wanted her to wrap me in a handmaid blanket and give me warm milk and honey, so devastating were the melodies.

Ugh, I can't believe I'm falling for this bait.
1) Being really into something that's less popular is far geekier than being into something that's popular. That's almost the definition of geeky.
2) Inspiring the creation of D&D is incredibly geeky.
3) Not that it matters, but you are aware that it was entirely possible for books to become wildly popular before the invention of the internet and DVDs, right? That in fact way more people read books before the invention of those things, right? I'm not comparing their popularity then and now -- not even anecdotally -- because I wouldn't know how to do that. But the books were very, very popular in the 60s. Just because you hadn't heard of them before people talked about the movies on the internet, does mean that no one read them.
These points may seem contradictory, but the main thread is that your reasoning is muddled.